Friday, April 12, 2013

Fingers crossed

I admit it: I'm a worrywart. At our last leadership convention in 2006 Conservatives played dirty tricks, circulating fake buttons and posters to try to discourage delegates from voting for Bob Rae. Has Harper dropped another little turd to surprise us with on Sunday? It's probably fine; I haven't heard even a murmur of suspicion; but I can't help worrying.

5 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Ah the evil that is Stephen Harper.He is everywhere, yet, he is no where. When your done blaming every little friggin' thing on someone else would you let Canadians know? They'd like the Liberal party of Canada back and not a group of sniveling little whiners.

Hi Anonymous at 10:49 - It certainly did happen, and was reported at the time in the Globe, on CTV, and elsewhere. Here's what I wrote about it at the time:

It turns out that the Harper Tories have a bit of Tricky Dick in them. And they seem to be proud of it. CTV reports that immediately after the election of Stephane Dion, Tories on the convention floor started boasting that they had defeated Bob Rae. The Tories claimed that they had been handing out buttons saying "Go for Bob/Go for Broke," "Make Bob the first NDP prime minister," and "Vote Bob. Who needs Ontario?" - and that hundreds of delegates were wearing the Tory buttons while they voted. They also claimed that they had fabricated an internal party memo suggesting they were most afraid of facing Ignatieff as leader, but not afraid of a Rae win.

Jamie Elmhirst, president of the Liberal Party of Canada (BC), addressed this issue in a memo to his members, in which he said (in part):

"CTV reports that immediately after the election of Stephane Dion, Tories on the convention floor started boasting that they had defeated Bob Rae. The Tories claimed that they had been handing out buttons saying "Go for Bob/Go for Broke," "Make Bob the first NDP prime minister," and "Vote Bob. Who needs Ontario?" - and that hundreds of delegates were wearing the Tory buttons while they voted. They also claimed that they had fabricated an internal party memo suggesting they were most afraid of facing Ignatieff as leader, but not afraid of a Rae win.

"Am I the only one who finds it utterly mind-boggling that the governing party of Canada sent people into the Liberal Party convention to perform these kinds of dirty tricks? Is Karl Rove already on the Conservative Party of Canada pay-roll?"

...and I just saw that James Moore was also an observer at the 2011 NDP leadership convention, where he called the NDP "loonies" and "business haters".

That's not as bad as boasting that you've disrupted the election process of another party, but it shows a similar sneering lack of respect. I guess the Conservative perspective is that it doesn't matter what you do as long as it helps you win: democracy shemocracy.